


Lucid Nightmares

by actualcoolcat



Series: Recovery comes with Relapses [3]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Basically, Dissociation, Graphic Description of Corpses, Masky comes to the rescue, Nightmare Sequence, Other, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, The Operator tries to take Tim, Tim has a bad time, dead bodies, there's something symbolic about accepting yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24261280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualcoolcat/pseuds/actualcoolcat
Summary: His nightmares were real. His nightmares wanted to hurt him. And more often than not, they did.He could feel It as It presses against his mind, ripping at his synapses, at the incompatible tissue, the organic, human aspects torn apart and corrupted and changed and forgotten and he’s been through this before and It’s trying to change him and It’s trying to take control and he can’t let It can’t let it happen again won’t he won’t he can’t.
Relationships: Timothy "Tim" Wright & Masky, some light Brim you'll miss if you blink
Series: Recovery comes with Relapses [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1751296
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Lucid Nightmares

Nightmares.

They were common; he was well acquainted with them through his life. He knew the medical terms used for them: night terrors, sleep paralysis. Your mind playing tricks on you, nothing actually being there once you regained the use of your limbs and your brain caught up with your body. Just the dark playing a trick on you, just something bad you ate before bed, just some tangible reason to explain away the fake visions your head produced to scare the shit out of you. Unspeakable horrors weren’t real, scary stories and monsters saved for campfires and fiction novels. No one actually saw the creatures that made up nightmares—anyone who claimed to was clearly insane, out of their mind, some poor unfortunate soul who had a bit too much to drink and needed to be on a heavy prescription to just stop being scared out of their own mind.

He’d been through that whole spiel multiple times through his life. He’d waited in multiple doctor’s offices, sat on different plastic chairs as therapists picked at his brain and tried to assure him it was all in his mind. _Your nightmares aren’t real_ , they would say. _They can’t hurt you_ , another assurance that proved to be false.

His nightmares were real. His nightmares wanted to hurt him. And more often than not, they did.

He wanted to believe, wanted to shove the reality of his situation out of his head and agree with the doctors—" _yes, I’m insane! I have schizophrenia! I have psychosis! I’m out of my mind and nothing I experience is real or dangerous.”_ He tried. Then people died. He can’t try that again.

Sometimes the nightmares start out as dreams, luring him into that false sense of security before it’s pulled out from beneath him. He’s like an outsider in those situations, watching from a frosted plane as memories played out in front of him. No matter how much he yelled or screamed, no one noticed him, his own breath fogging up the glass. He’d stare, unable to pull his gaze away as some of his happiest memories played out in front of him. Sitting on his dorm room floor, some ungodly hour of the morning spent strumming his guitar and singing horrendous songs with Brian, his smile and laughter piercing through him and reverberating through his skull. Tim would pull his eyes away, only to see the image shift around him, eyes locking onto the prone figure on the ground. Bent at an awkward angle, tan hoodie bunched around a broken form, red frown staring up at him from a blackened face and all Tim could hear was static, whispers, _his fault his fault his fault, left him to die, left Brian to die, ran away from him again ran away ran away, a coward, he caused this his fault, left his friend to die and be taken by the thing that came out of his own fucked up mind all his fault all his—_

Tim wakes up and runs to the bathroom, vomiting in the sink as he tries not to look in the mirror. Knows what he’ll see there, see those too long fingers on a too slender frame, pale and needle-like and _not real not real not real._ He won’t remember it in the morning.

\---

He goes to work. He doesn’t like being out at night, but he didn’t have much of a choice. Graveyard shifts kept him away from people and gave him a way to pass the time until the darkness ended. He never liked what he saw lurking in the dark, knowing it was right beyond his vision looming in the tree line. He didn’t like how the factory was situated in the middle of nowhere off the main road. Didn’t like the forest, but didn’t complain. He was inside most of the time anyway.

He’s out by the time the first shifters started driving up in their cars. It’ll still be an hour till the sun rises at this time of the year, and he focuses on the flame of his lighter, clutching his keys tightly as he walks to his car. He has the key in the door before he makes the mistake of looking up, seeing his reflection in the lowlight of his car window. Pale, white face, painted black eyes and lips staring back at him. He sees a creeping pale hand of a too tall figure reaching down to his shoulder. He doesn’t think. He spins around. Bad idea.

He knows it’s not a nightmare this time when the world around him fades, the high pitch ringing in his ears causing him to clutch at his head, vertigo bringing him to his knees against the crunch of dead leaves and not asphalt. He winces, glancing up through the pain to see the parking lot was nowhere in sight, surrounded instead only by slender trees and darkness. He feels the branches bend, hears the creaks, knows he’s not alone. Tim is hyperventilating as he tries to break through his nausea, rising on shaking legs as he spits blood out of his mouth. He bolts. Another bad idea. A tree root _(not a root not a root)_ catches his foot, bringing him crashing down against the forest floor. He feels it wrapped around his leg, screams, kicks, digs his nails into the dirt and tries to pull himself away. He can’t get any traction, ground feels like mud, _sinking, sinking_ , yanked and pulled down till his scream is cut off.

\---

He wakes with a start, not knowing when he lost conscious—couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, his body simply unable to supply his eyes with a proper comprehension of what just happened— his world spinning in further vertigo, head feeling like he knocked it against the ground too harshly. He tastes blood in his mouth, hacks and coughs, a thick substance spilling out of his lips that only resembled blackness in the moonlight. He can’t track his location, knows he’s still somewhere in the forest, but doesn’t have the awareness to know where in relation to his car. He’s cold, can see his breath, shivers wracking through his body and making it all the harder to regain control of himself.

Tim is slowly able to pull himself up to his feet, one foot at a time until he’s wobbly standing upright, hand still clutching at his head. He shivers again, feels the cold seeping through the thin layer of his work shirt. The sweat coating him only makes the chill spread further across his arms and neck, seeping down into his bones. He takes a tentative step, pain shooting up his leg as he curses to himself. His nerves felt shot, like needles prickling up and down from even the slightest movement. He bites the inside of his cheek, forces his body to take another step, dragging his feet as he picked a random direction to walk.

He knew he wasn’t alone; knew he was being watched—the sensation driving his senses haywire as the paranoia took over. He just had to keep moving, get out of the forest, get home. He limps for a few moments before he feels the world around him shifting again, Tim cursing and shutting his eyes quickly to avoid another wave of vertigo. When he feels everything starting to settle, the temperature around him only seemed to drop lower. His teeth are chattering as he forces his eyes open again. This, too, was a bad idea.

There was a large tree in the center of a clearing, a few hundred feet from where Tim now stood. There were no leaves on the branches and no wind, the surrounding forest eerily free of any sound or wildlife. The bark was dark as black in the lowlight, almost looking charred and burnt from this distance. There wasn’t anything particularly horrifying about the tree itself, despite the sense of wrongness it seemed to give off in waves. No, the horrific sight came from the twisting, curved branches that shined with an unidentifiable liquid in the moonlight. Impaled on the branches were bodies. Twisted, horrific remains of what were once bodies.

Jay. Brian. Alex. Strung up like decorations, put on display just for him. Tim tries to stumble away but the clearing closes around him, his back hitting against rough bark and preventing him from running further back as the tree seems to shift closer and closer to him until he was directly below the gruesome sight. Part of his mind knew this wasn’t real, knew it wasn’t possible. Yet he couldn’t help staring, the sense of dread and fear the sight was meant to encourage only spiking in his already paranoid state. He couldn’t think clearly. Couldn’t think when he saw the way the branch pierced through Jay’s stomach, hoisting his unmoving body into the sky. Couldn’t look away from Brian’s crumbled form, spine contorted, limbs at odd angles, neck broken and hanging limply off a branch. Even Alex, the justified death, a branch poking through the back of his skull and out of his mouth, throat sliced open and still dripping blood down his front and to the ground below, watering the tree.

Tim feels himself breaking down, feels the stinging in his eyes and the rawness of his throat as he screams at the sight, at the gore and regret and the results of his FAULT. His heels dig into the dirt, presses his back further against the bark of the tree behind him, missing how he feels it shifting, eyes too focused on the sight in front of him to see the branches closing in on him from his peripherals.

His vision goes dark, and despite how much he’s trying, despite the burning and pain and fear in him, his voice is caught in his throat and no scream comes out.

\---

He feels the hiss of static before he hears it, grasping at his head and coughing again, a chill running down the back of his neck. Not breath _no mouth can’t breathe it wasn’t human wasn’t real._ The chill of spindling _(hands, branches, tentacles)_ against his skin, dipping into his mind like there wasn’t a barrier of flesh and bone protecting him. He can’t move, can’t scream, just feels _cold cold cold_ as neurons tried to fire tried to make sense of the sensation, the wrongness of it all, the feeling of something creeping and foreign invading his mind and killing it It was killing him It had to be he was too cold. Like a spiderweb, stitching itself through his atoms, almost curiosity and possession driving fingers deeper and deeper into his skull until his whole mind was frozen, felt like ice was pressing back against his eyes. _Why why why_ he could feel It in his mind and it was agonizing It was assimilating it was wrong _it was wrong_.

Tim was acutely aware of the presence of the abomination, felt It through each of his senses. He felt more connected than ever to It, scratching at his eyes, crushing against his throat, legs uselessly tethered and immobilized. He wants to scream, can only get a pitiful whine out passed his lips. He shutters, swears it almost coos at him, mocking some semblance of humanity It can’t grasp. Tim loosely tried to make sense, thoughts sputtering out uselessly, merged, regurgitated, alien and not him. Can’t stop can’t change, accept, spread. _More more more_. It presses against his mind, ripping at his synapses, at the incompatible tissue, the organic, human aspects torn apart and corrupted and changed and forgotten and he’s been through this before and It’s trying to change him and It’s trying to take control and he can’t let It can’t let it happen again won’t he won’t he can’t not his fault.

_Not his fault. Not his fault. Not his fault. Wake up, dumbass._

Tim yanks himself forward, focusing on something beyond the static, the noise, the cold— something deep and buried inside his consciousness where It couldn’t reach, and Tim throws himself desperately at it. Tim pushes up off of his legs, broken, shaking, pulling against the force that kept him down and he falls forward.

\---

He falls, crashes down against a hard cement floor. He squints his eyes open, still too cold, still out of breath, coughing and hacking up another glob of black blood. It’s quiet. Tim’s eyes are bleary and he tries to focus on his surroundings, his head throbbing and he can’t help but wonder if he has a concussion at this point from how many times he’d hit it during this fiasco. He doesn’t sense the Thing anywhere around him, and almost thinks he’s alone before hearing the crunch of broken glass behind him. He knows where he is, can’t forget the interior of the hospital no matter how he tried to forget, but when he turns his head the figure in front of him was not who he expected.

Tim’s cheek presses against the crumbled drywall and debris of the floor, feels blood starting to drip and pool under him. His head is spinning, and he blinks, but that doesn’t remove the image of the figure in front of him. Tim watches as he _(himself, staring down at him, white mask emotionless_ ) shakes his head. Tim is sure his sanity is completely broken down at this point if he was seeing himself, maybe he was dissociating, but he felt as real as anything did right now. Retreated so far into his mind that he was facing down himself.

He (the one with the mask), doesn’t say anything, just starts walking over to where Tim’s crumbled form rested against the floor. Tim can’t get his body to move regardless of the panic and dread running through his veins, but the masked him stops before actually touching him. He ( _they_?) stare each other down for a few seconds before he held out a hand to Tim. Tim gives an incredulous look at the offered hand, not moving to do anything. There’s a silent sigh from the masked him, shoulders the only indication of the motion. He looks right and left _(looking for something? Checking to make sure they were alone? Still safe?)_ before shoving his hand a bit more insistently in Tim’s face. Tim doesn’t know what to think about that, his fear towards his other half almost equal to the fear of the Thing that plagued them. He’s hesitating, about to turn it down, when he catches his own eye, urging forward a memory from their shared consciousness.

_Different from before. Don’t run away._

With the last ounce of his energy Tim reaches out to grasp his other’s hand, the masked figure pulling them up as the world around them shifted one last time.

\---

Tim can’t catch his feet, but he falls gently enough to his knees, leaning heavily against the nearby tree. He doesn’t know how long he had been gone, but the sun was risen at this point, filtering through the leaves and warming his still too frozen skin. He hears the birds. Doesn’t feel Its presence around. He gives his tired bones and wrecked nerves a moment to calm themselves. He still can’t stop shivering, and his legs didn’t want to move, but he was alive. Even more, he _remembered_. The thoughts were foggy, frazzled, abused but they were still _there_ , he hadn’t forgotten. He coughs, lungs aching, feels his whole body overcome with nausea at the foreign presence that had overpowered him. He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to go out in public anytime soon, if the faint ringing and static that he could only directionally guessed came from himself was any indicator.

There’s a quiet sob as he leaned against the tree, curling as much in on himself as he could, trying not to think too hard on what just happened until he was safe, until he was out of this fucking forest. His nightmares were real; his nightmares wanted to hurt him. More often than not, they did.

**Author's Note:**

> Going to make this a collection of short drabbles where I just write about Tim. 
> 
> Other characters and relationship exploration??? You'll just have to stay tuned I guess.


End file.
